The US may understand the consequences of imperial overreach
sooner than anyone thought possible. Russia's decision to drop the South Stream
natural gas pipeline in favor of a deal with key NATO member Turkey may be the
first of a series of events that could challenge and ultimately destroy the Anglo-American
empire. Turkey's bold decision risks its
standing with its western allies by undercutting the EU's efforts to bully
Russia, but promises enormous benefit to Turkey's economic influence in Europe.

While President Erdogan hasn't shown his full hand, it may play out such that
the West's quixotic quest to control the Mideast could end sooner than seemed
possible. EU and US insults to Turkey have driven it into Russian arms. The
anti-Putin coalition seems to have burned both bridges between Eastern fossil
fuel sources and Western markets. Energy costs to citizens of EU nations will
skyrocket. If they protest vigorously enough, their puppet governments may
finally decide that their cozy relationships with the Anglo-American alliance
are not worth the cost.

Turkey has been rebuffed repeatedly in its efforts to join the EU. That is an insult
to a proud nation, a member of NATO with a stronger economy than many of the former
Soviet satellites. These weaker nations joined this coalition of Western
belligerents after the fall of the USSR, violating 1994 agreements by NATO not
to expand toward Russian borders. Unlike
Turkey, many of them were also enticed to join the EU. None of these newer
states have benefited much from inclusion in Europe's economy. They are
suffering from the same austerity measures as the rest of the EU. Like Ukraine,
corruption has remained as endemic in many countries under its governance as it
was under the old Soviet system.

A number of these Eastern European nations would have benefited from South
Stream, getting access to cheap gas and profiting from transit fees. Politicians in Bulgaria, which in 2013 witnessed
some of the largest demonstrations in Europe since the 2008 crash, initially lobbied
for the pipeline but ultimately sided with the EU against their own national
interests. Now Bulgarians will pay the price along with the rest of the EU for
its outrageous demand that Russia surrender ownership of the pipeline. This was
a condition of the Third
Energy Package, which Russia never ratified .
It was designed to punish Russia for
refusing to privatize its fossil fuel industry during the looting of Russia
that followed the Yeltsin coup. Some speculate that Bulgaria or Greece
might make separate deals with Russia for gas via subsidiary pipelines, the
price for which may be other economic and even military alliances.

According to some analysts, the last straw for Turkey was US arming of the Kurdish
fighters in Syria, which Turkey considers allied with the PKK, Kurdish separatists
who are listed by both Turkey and the US as a terrorist group. The US states
that the change in policy was for the humanitarian purpose of protecting the residents
of the Syrian border town of Kobani from ISIS siege. However, US bombing did little
to effectively degrade ISIS forces before the mercenary army invaded Kobani and
melted into the city. Now, air strikes that might hit the terrorist
infiltrators would be as likely to kill remaining civilians.

Arming of the PYD (the Syrian Kurdish defense forces) led to the natural
suspicion that Turkey was being pressured to invade Syria in self-defense. The
US had been demanding that Turkey supply the ground troops to fight ISIS, which
sprang from the NATO/GCC/Israeli attempt to use terrorists to topple Assad. Erdogan's
government has been deeply involved in providing routes for terrorists and
weapons to enter Syria since the outbreak of the "civil war," along with
limited military assistance. He has insisted on a plan prioritizing the defeat
of the Assad government rather than ISIS, over which Western intelligence
agencies seem to still exercise some control. All of these conflicts have
followed US finger pointing at Turkey's complicity in the creation of ISIS,
while ignoring its own role.

US foreign policy is driven by the ambitions of the psychopaths on Wall Street
who virtually run the government. They are guided by the knowledge of the
inevitable failure of the dollar. This is the reason that the US has been
waging all-out war for global corporate domination. The manic military policies
of the last two administrations are a last ditch effort to control fossil fuel
supplies and transit routes not just for profit, but to continue to prop up the
Petrodollar. It may be too late. Russia and China are taking the lead in
weaning themselves from dependence on the dollar not only to sell or buy fossil
fuels but for other goods. The two nations signed an agreement in October to
settle international debts in their own currencies. That trade is projected to
more than double by 2020 to $200 billion. Meanwhile, the BRICS bank may ultimately free
other nations from dollar domination by providing an alternative to the IMF,
whose loan conditions include removing currency controls designed to prevent
Western speculators from destabilize their national currencies.

The key event to watch out for is the response of Angela Merkel. With the
largest economy in Europe, Germany has the biggest voice in the EU and weaker
states are sure to follow its lead. Merkel has been largely cooperating with
the sanctions on Russia, while at the same time speaking out against more
draconian measures. As with Obama, her bombastic claims about
"Russian imperialism" in the Ukraine are for domestic consumption. The German
industrialists whose interests she represents understand this, but have been concerned
about the effects of the sanctions on the national and EU economies, which have
been teetering toward yet another recession. The loss of cheap gas from Russia may
be the one consequence of slavish adherence to US foreign policy objectives
they will not tolerate.

If ordinary Germans join influential business leaders in Germany in calling for
an end to allowing the US to dictate its foreign policies, the question of the
wisdom of EU support for NATO might arise with the general public. If so, the
revolt could spread elsewhere. Eventually, the contagion of rebellion could
even reach US shores. A lot depends on how willing normally staid German
society is willing to demand an end to its government's complicity in yet
another attempt at establishing what amounts to global fascism. They are
already angry at revelations of US spying on their government officials and of
CIA manipulation of their corporate media. Having already experienced the
consequences of allowing their government to engage in imperialist wars, they
may rise to stop it this time around. We can only hope that generations of
post-war prosperity have not made them as docile as their American
counterparts.

The question has become one of how much Europeans are willing to bear to sustain
a global system that is nearing its end. The cost of the collapse of the
financialized, debt-based world economy is leaving them and the entire developed
world with declining living standards and mounting debt. Meanwhile, the rich
get richer. It is only a matter of time before Europe wakes up to what the
developing nations have always known: Capitalism is based on exploitation and
its aim is to monopolize resources for the benefit of the few. All that remains
to be seen is whether the People unite to take down this system before the only
way to fight the police state Europe and the US are becoming is violence.

As this global game of Monopoly winds down to its conclusion, at some point the
people of the world must rise up and change the rules of the game. The
alternative is economic chaos and suffering on a scale never before witnessed,
followed by the consignment of our children and all future generations to debt
slavery.

I am a former Army and VA psychiatrist who ran for the US Senate in 2010 on a campaign based on a pledge to introduce a constitutional amendment to abolish corporate personhood.
Now that the general public is beginning to understand the (more...)

"Rob Kall's Bottom Up is a revaluation of values, not the empty mouthing of the word 'democracy' that is so common, but the application of belief in popular wisdom to every aspect of life. Actually believing that the views of more people is better, means a new way of thinking about the world that is democratic, feminist, localist, populist, and radically richer than the elitist perspectives that are more common even in the parts of the world that shout the word 'democracy' the most. Here we come to understand both the power of small groups and the upsides to internet crowd sourcing, the potential of nonviolent movements and ways in which the past has not been what we supposed. Don't just read this book; get lots of people to read and talk about it."

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